The first time I used an Apple computer was…

When Steve Jobs died, I thought about the year 1984 (give or take), when I was …

Jon Brodkin, Senior IT Reporter

When I saw the news that Steve Jobs had died, my first thought was the terrible loss the technology world has suffered. My second thought brought me back to 1984 (give or take), when I was about 5 years old and my parents bought an Apple IIe. It was the first computer I ever used.

Even as a child, I knew there was something fundamentally new and exciting going on, that this was a step forward in human capability. At the very least, typewriters suddenly were archaic. Over the years, I used our first computer to write reports for school (sometimes) but spent many more hours playing games like Montezuma’s Revenge, Sherwood Forest, The Oregon Trail and Conan: Hall of Volta. I got lost in those games, and the keyboard picked up new specks of dirt with each passing month. My mother tells me we got the computer through a program called Apple for the Teacher, and it cost $2,000 even though she got a slight discount as a member of the School Committee. It was our family’s primary computer for at least five years. We used floppy disks to load software and save files, and sometimes when I was bored of video games I played another game called "see if you can destroy a floppy disk."

Later, our first Internet-enabled PCs ran MS-DOS and Windows, and the most exciting technology for me was Nintendo and the Game Boy. Apple didn’t have Mario. But Apple is the company that introduced me to computers, which have made so much of my own life possible. As a student and young adult I spent 20 years using Windows PCs, yet Apple creeped back into my life in 2004 when I bought my first iPod. I still use that iPod nearly every day, and its enduring nature and simplicity of use led me to several more Apple purchases, including an iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. As an occasional history buff, I marvel at the impact Jobs and his competitor Bill Gates had on my life and the lives of so many others. But mostly, I remember what it was like when I first used an Apple computer.

I asked my colleagues at Ars Technica to share recollections of their first experiences with Apple technology. Here’s what they have to say.

Jacqui Cheng, Senior Apple Editor

My first Mac was also my first computer: my mother’s Mac SE, which I began using in the late 1980s and was eventually gifted to me a few years later when she upgraded to a newer, fancier Mac. I was in grade school and the appeal of manipulating what were then the coolest computer-generated graphics around was irresistible. I instantly became addicted—both to computers and to the Mac itself—and became a lifelong user.

In high school, I owned a Motorola StarMax Mac clone (before Steve Jobs shut the clone program down, of course), and in college, I progressed through the ownership of a blue and white G3 tower, a tangerine iBook, and a titanium PowerBook G4. I was also a member of the Purdue University Mac Users Group (shout out to all my PUMUG peeps who are Ars readers today!), where I eventually became secretary and helped to lead the group into the new era of Mac OS X. But I was never the aggressive, trollish, converting type—my approach was always one of love and tolerance of our PC-using friends (I did learn how to program on a PC, after all). I made many lifelong friends because of our collective Mac-and-PC-loving nerdery.

Being a Mac user is what brought me to Ars Technica. I came to this site as a humble community member in 2001 when Ars opened its first Mac forum. I began writing for the Apple section of the site in 2005 thanks to that first Mac, and became editor in 2006. Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Mac helped steer me down the path to where I am today, and for that, I will always be grateful.

Dave Girard, Contributing Writer

The first time I used an Apple computer was when my mother was an elementary school teacher and, while she worked late at her desk, I sat in the computer room at her school playing Moon Patrol on what I think was an Apple II. To this day, I can still remember the strange resilience of 5.25” floppies and I don't know that I forgive Steve for taking them away from me.

Eric Bangeman, Managing Editor

Apple and I go way back. I cut my computing teeth on one of the ten or so Ohio Scientific Challenger 2Ps in my high school computer lab in 1980. They didn't last long. It wasn't long before the large blue OSI metal boxes, 9" black-and-white TVs, and cassette players were gone, replaced by a room full of Apple ][+ computers. I spent many an hour bathed by the glow of the green, monochrome monitors in the lab, and upon graduation, knew I needed one to take to college. My best friend (and college-roommate-to-be) and I pooled our graduation money and summer job earnings and headed off to suburban Minneapolis in the late summer of 1984 with a brand-new Apple //e. We pimped it out as best we could within our $2,000 budget, which meant a single floppy drive, monochrome monitor, ImageWriter dot-matrix printer, and an 80-column card. It was the bomb, especially since we were the only students on our tiny college campus with a computer.

Needless to say, the //e got a lot of use. There were papers to type (and with my mad typing skills, I soon had a decent business typing term papers for others), programs to write, and, most importantly, games to play. While the //e was by no stretch of the imagination a paragon of brilliant industrial design, the hardware and software melded in a way that made using it satisfying. I had a fair amount of experience with other PCs of the era—TI-99/4A, TRS-80, Commodore 64—and the Apple was by far the most enjoyable to use.

Before my sophomore year I got a job setting up the college's first computer lab. The boxes that greeted me early one August morning contained a multitude of IBM clones, keyboards, and monitors, but there was one box that stood out. It was a single 128K Macintosh. The sleek design (compared to the beige IBM boxes), built-in black-and-white monitor, and mouse intrigued me. I set all of the computers up and got them all running, but I found myself returning to the Mac time and time again. The user interface was light years ahead of what the PCs in the room offered, and typing papers in MacWrite and actually seeing what the page would look like before printing was just amazing. I even ditched my //e to do as much of my computing as possible on the Macintosh.

After college, I used my roommate's Mac Classic. When I finally bought my next computer several years later, it was a Mac (a PowerBook 165), as has every computer I have purchased since that I have not built myself. Good hardware and operating systems should be celebrated no matter what the platform, and I appreciate the innovations that have come from different manufacturers. But the Mac and the operating systems they have run have always felt like home, and that's why I've been using them for 26 years.

John Timmer, Science Editor

Like many others, I became aware of Apple computers thanks to the Apple II, which a number of my friends owned. By that time, however, I had already committed to a Commodore 64, which helped get me through high school and college. It was clearly past its time by graduation, and I headed off to graduate school without a computer. The lab I worked in was an Apple shop (as many biology labs were), so I had my first extended experience with the Mac on a IIci there.

About halfway through graduate school, someone realized that the terms of our funding required that it be paid back if we didn't continue on in research, which technically made it a loan. This set off a rush of amended tax returns as we all frantically tried to claim retroactive refunds. Most of these claims were arbitrarily rejected, but I was one of the lucky few: three years of back taxes, refunded all at once. Shortly afterwards, one of the just-released PowerMacs, a bottom-of-the-line 6100, was mine (I also bought a wetsuit so I could go windsurfing in San Francisco Bay and some parts for my bike).

Over the years, I added RAM, a bigger hard drive, a video card that could handle a 17" monitor, overclocked it, and subjected it to all sorts of abuse, not the least of which involved typing my thesis on it. As Apple looked to be going under, I experimented with putting a Mach-based version of Linux on it (that didn't last). The hardware itself never caused a hiccup, but eventually was simply too slow to handle the sorts of things my research career was requiring me to do, so it was eventually retired in favor of a G3. A few years later, it experienced a resurgence when my mom decided she wanted to learn to use a computer. That time, it was replaced by a second generation iMac, and ended up being recycled.

I can't say Apple inspired a lifetime love of computers and technology in me—I had those long before I bought my first Mac. But it was the first computer that I really had ownership of. It was easy to open up, and I really took advantage of that to mess around with the hardware. In comparison, the Commodore 64 was a black box to me. Despite Apple's reputation for building a closed system, the 6100 helped me appreciate that computers really were tools that even a klutz like me could open up and tweak to better fit my needs. I now use laptops and do my tweaking via software, but it's a sense that hasn't left me.

Ben Kuchera, Gaming Editor

I was taught how to do very basic programming on an Apple II and created a very primitive video game in a technology class when I was a child. This taught me two things: I wasn't interested in making my own games, and video games came from people. Growing up, I thought they just appeared in the stores somehow, and it didn't occur to me that actual people used actual skills and talent to create the games I played.

Steve Jobs always seemed famously uninterested in video games, and his apathy led indirectly to the creation of Electronic Arts. That being said, he's done more to democratize video game creation and sales than anyone who isn't named Gabe Newell. In many ways the iPhone and iPad are ideal to play games, and anyone with a computer and a little bit of money can create their own games and sell them directly to gamers. The touch screen took the complexity out of modern controllers so anyone could play, and Apple took down many of the walls that stand between hobby developers and the audience they wish to reach.

Steve Jobs started Apple in a garage, and it's perhaps fitting that he helped others who were working in their figurative—and sometimes literal—garages. Gaming on Apple's portable devices is huge, and the market has been home to a number of creative and cultural tidal waves. Apple has changed the state of the art for computers, for music, for movies, and also for games. I've spent many a wonderful evening with my iPad and a great game, headphones covering my ears, completely lost in the experience.

Aurich Lawson, Creative Director

The Macintosh wasn't the first computer I used, or even the first one by Apple, but it was the first one that truly mattered. I was six years old when we bought the original Macintosh 128K, and MacPaint was a revelatory experience. With nothing but a black-and-white screen and a size that seems comically small by today's standards, I was pushing pixels on a virtual canvas with a mouse, absolutely captivated. I would spend hours drawing, iterating, and utterly lost in a world of my own making. On a basic and primal level there isn't much difference between what I did in MacPaint as a child, and what I do now in Photoshop.

It's not hyperbole to say my life wouldn't be the same without visionaries like Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and Bill Atkinson. Computers are just tools, the "creative people use Macs" canard is ridiculous, but the Macintosh is my tool. With it I connected to the world with my first 1200-baud modem, created art both personal and commercial, produced music and started a record label, and found a career that lets me do what I love with an amazing group of people.

I was surprised how strong my reaction to the news of Steve's passing hit me. But after reflecting on how much the man has meant to me for almost my entire life, in so many ways that fundamentally matter to me I realized it was the only natural reaction. He changed the world. We're all living in a better one because of him, I truly believe that. I know my life wouldn't be the same without his vision.

Chris Foresman, Contributing Writer

My first memory of using Apple computers was from around 1981. I was a kindergartener at Riverside Elementary School in Altamonte Springs, Florida. In addition to having the benefit of being able to watch pretty much every Space Shuttle launch by walking out into the playground and looking roughly south and west, we also had the luxury of having about a dozen Apple IIs stuffed into a tiny room in the corner of the school's library.

Occasionally, I was able to go to the library to play Math Blaster. I remember watching the animated "aliens" dancing around the monochromatic green phosphor screen with simple addition or subtraction problems on them. Typing in the correct answer would "blast" them to smithereens and save the planet. Imagine—saving the world with math!

Later I would use Apple IIs to learn BASIC programing, make fake newspapers and crazy banners using PrintShop, and play hours and hours of Laser Chess and Oregon Trail. In junior high I learned how to generate graphics using Logo, and then how to program more advanced graphics using PEEK and POKE commands to send data to specific registers.

In high school, I learned very rudimentary computer-aided design using an Apple II in a drafting course. But I got my first chance to use a Mac in electronics and graphics design courses taught by the same instructor. That teacher had a Mac SE in his room, and when we weren't using it to play Sim City, we were learning Freehand and Quark on its tiny 9" black and white screen. We would even use Freehand to draw out circuits by copying and pasting pre-drawn symbols and drawing lines to connect them.

Though I've also used TRS-80s, Ataris, Amigas, Sparcs, and yes, even DOS and Windows PCs over the years, I’ve never stopped using Apple products.

Ryan Paul, Open Source Editor

There and back again

I learned to program on an Apple II, my very first computer. I have fond memories of many afternoons and late evenings spent typing BASIC code into the ProDOS line editor. I started my journey by typing in code from books. I would painstakingly double-check every line to make sure I got it all right.

Tenacity and fascination with the machine carried me through the painful early steps, but my chief motivation became passion when I finally learned enough to write my own code from scratch. I made games, tools, and even a little bit of low-resolution art. The Apple II opened my mind to the creative potential of technology and the empowering joy of software development.

I learned to program on that Apple II at the same age that I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, one of the other powerful influences of my youth. The story filled me with the same sense of awe and wonder that I had found in code. At a young age, I thought that the computer was the closest thing to true magic that had ever existed in our world. Like Bilbo’s unexpected party, my discovery of the Apple II was the start of a magical adventure that transformed my life and changed everything I had ever known into something infinitely greater.

Years later, when Steve Jobs described the iPad as a “magical” device, I snorted incredulously. As a jaded technologist, almost nothing seems magical to me anymore. But then I began to remember my childhood and the simple magic that I had discovered in the Apple II. The secret ingredient behind Apple’s greatness is its enduring belief in magic: the conviction that great things can inspire awe and change the world for the better.

In Tolkien’s world, wizards are wise, powerful, and farseeing. They are subtle and quick to anger, attentive to the smallest of details, and capable of seeing greatness in the humblest of hobbits. They are fallible, but also fearless—even when confronted with seemingly certain defeat. There are very few people in the age of man that deserve to be called wizards, but Steve Jobs is one of them.

I went through several boxed sets of Lord of the Rings over the years, reading them with love until they fall apart. My Apple II has fared better—it is still fully functional after all this time. I kept it as a memento of the challenges I overcame when I learned to program. But after Steve’s words encouraged me to think about the joy that the Apple II brought me in my childhood, it has become a much more powerful symbol. It is the light that holds back the bitter cynicism that I’ve accumulated with age. It reminds me that magic still exists, as long as we believe.

Although the iPad has brought magic to many, I have found it to be decidedly less magical than my Apple II. I am deeply grateful to Steve Jobs and in awe of Apple’s tremendous achievements, but the company’s increasingly restrictive application policies on mobile devices—which prohibit the use of child-friendly programming environments such as Scratch—might prevent the next generation of young technologists from experiencing the same joy that I discovered when I learned to program on the Apple II. Steve Jobs was a great man who has left behind a powerful legacy. I hope that the company he created will honor his legacy by eventually righting this one wrong that he didn’t find time to rectify during his lifetime.

Casey Johnston, Associate Writer

My first experience with Apple, like so many of my generation without Apple nerd parents, was with an iPod. I bought my third-generation iPod with money earned from an after-school job at a grocery store, and proceeded to stuff it with music and keep my earbuds in between classes as long as possible (this pre-dated the hoodie trick).

Since the first candy-colored iMacs and iBooks appeared in ads and my school's computer lab when I was ten, I'd envied their design over my beige computer tower. I buried this admiration in snide comments about the computers' hockey puck mice and quixotic error messages.

Freshman year of college, my only computer was a $1,000 Gateway laptop, a behemoth rivaled only in weight by its own power brick. When the Office trial ran out, the hard drive failed, and the screen began to flicker only a year after buying it, I fixed the hard drive, passed it on to my mom, and did a crazy thing only banks circa 2006 would let you do: I took out a small personal loan and bought one of the new white MacBooks.

I took my class notes in TextEdit, video chatted with my mom and boyfriend with the webcam, played copious amounts of World of Warcraft. Five and half years (and several repairs, thanks to the Apple Protection Plan) later, my MacBook still works. And as stupid as yet another loan is for a college student, to this day I don't regret a single payment.

Jonathan Gitlin, Contributing Writer

It would have been the late 1980s. My Dad's office was upgrading computers, and he brought home a IIe, and later a IIc, that weren't needed any more. I can still remember the IIc and its carrying handle; it took a while for Apple to get the concept of portable computers right, but boy did they ever. It really took off for me in 1989 though, when I moved to high school. Back then in the UK most schools used BBC Micro computers, but mine was equipped with a lab of Macintoshes, that we could use for everything from drawing chemical structures to making animated movies of stick figures skateboarding. From that point forward I knew there was Apple in my DNA.

1990. A Macintosh SE/30 running System 6.0.7 in the Chemistry Dept at Bristol University.

An undergraduate at the time, I used ChemDraw to prepare molecular orbital diagrams for an assignment. It was trivially easy (a revelation, of sorts), and most of all, fun. A few months later I purchased an LC, and I've never looked backed.

Elementary school - I was first introduced to the Apple //c in the first grade computer lab. Number Munchers, BASIC, and countless hours of The Oregon Trail filled my childhood. Lots of fond memories.

Middle school - Oh my God... there are Macs! And such a variety! There was an eclectic mix of m68k models (and a couple of //gs boxes, stuck away in a computer lab and mostly used by a couple of teachers), mixed in with some new, very nice PowerPC all-in-one units. Clarisworks on an LC 575 was spiffy as hell. Secretly sneaking a Doom shareware install onto that box was even better. I was crestfallen when my parents bought me a PC instead, until I bought Doom II and discovered the world of PC gaming, and the flexibility of the command line.

High school - Mostly PCs in use, outside of one or two labs... until I took a course my junior year that amounted to unpaid IT help for my school district. Some assholes had broken into a school after-hours and trashed about 35 older integrated Macs, and I spent two hours recovering working parts from them. Even then I was struck by the elegant robustness of the design, and how easy it actually was to service the things.

I can't give godlike status to Steve Jobs - it's not like he did it all alone, and a lot of my fondest memories of the Mac platform were made when he wasn't at Apple. But he did what a great CEO should - he provided vision and focus to his company, got people excited about building products, and persuasively and engagingly showed the world what they could do, time and time again. Rest in peace, Steve - you've certainly earned it.

This has inspired me. I'm going to install emulators for the Apple //e and m68k Mac series onto my workstation when I get home.

For me, it was in 1st grade. I was in a program for gifted students at Walker Elementary (IQ of 160 or higher) called Kaleidoscope. Our teacher, Mrs. P (that's what we called her) had a classroom of Apple ][+'s with the old B&W monochrome monitors (a few green and amber screen too). We used to play brainteasers on them as class activities.

My grandfather bought a Apple 2 E for my uncle when I was 9 or 10 years old. I remember playing early computer games like Magic Vs. Bird, Star Trek adventure game, early baseball game where you played whole seasons with any player in history and many hours of Chopper Attack. I was more interested in my uncle's computer then him!

1984 for me... and it was mostly for playing games like Lode Runner, Pacman, Galaxian, and Space Invaders during lunch breaks. By 1985 at another company I was using it to run Visicalc via a Zilog Z80/128 MB RAM/language card add-in. Visicalc was the forerunner to Lotus 123 and ultimately Excel. The add-in card also allowed me to use M-BASIC (by Microsoft) to program the Apple IIe.

First ever computer I got my mits on was at the age of about 4. The Mac SE/20. So many hours wasted with games like Crystal Quest and doodles done in MacPaint and the like. Takes me right back to the joy I had, and the tears of agony when the CRT tube built into it bit the dust after many many years of loyal service.

Since that Mac, I haven't had one until the 2011 MacBook Air I recently purchased, but between that mac and all the PC's I've had I've loved my iPods and current iPhone. The joy I had as a kid has come around full circle since buying the Air and I've fallen in love with it again.

First used Apple IIgs in 3rd grade for Oregon Trail, Print Shop, and logo. Later, in high school, learned to type correctly on a room of Apple IIc's, with their green and black screens. Also started learning to program Pascal and BASIC on Apple IIc's in high school.

First used Apple IIgs in 3rd grade for Oregon Trail, Print Shop, and logo. Later, in high school, learned to type correctly on a room of Apple IIc's, with their green and black screens. Also started learning to program Pascal and BASIC on Apple IIc's in high school.

Wasn't Oregon Trail a blast?

We had this mystery game on the Apple ][+'s in our computer lab in elementary school. I wish I could remember the name of the game. It was an educational title that was supposed to develop critical thinking skills. By looking at various elements of a crime scene, you were supposed to deduce, "who done it" (aka, footprints leading from a beach to a remote home or the like).

1982. I had gotten straight A's in high school and just busted my leg playing soccer. TRS-80's seemed like the only competition in those days and I had enviously watched a friend write a Lunar Lander game that was playable on the TRS-80. I felt very lucky to get the Apple IIe as it had the high resolution and lots of color. It also had low resolution.

I remember having to load programs by tape recorder. I think my first and only program on tha tmachine was an assignment for school. I invented a BASIC program that drew numerals 0-9 diagonally starting with 0, refresh screen, 01, refresh screen, 012, refresh screen, 012...n. It took about a minute before a quickly drawn line of numbers became a single line that took forever to tdraw before the next screen refresh.

Totally useless, but a nice visual. Now that I think about it, I probably invented the screen saver.

I can't give godlike status to Steve Jobs - it's not like he did it all alone, and a lot of my fondest memories of the Mac platform were made when he wasn't at Apple. But he did what a great CEO should - he provided vision and focus to his company, got people excited about building products, and persuasively and engagingly showed the world what they could do, time and time again. Rest in peace, Steve - you've certainly earned it.

Job's garden were the seeds still have to do the hard part, grow. Rest easy man, you've earned it.

I don't remember the exact age, but I was in elementary school. My first two computers were an Apple IIc in 6th grade and a couple years later, when that one died, a IIe (with color monitor! ooh, ahh!)

I remember getting the IIc for Christmas. It was awesome! I copied BASIC programs out of magazines. I wrote countless papers & book reports on that thing, and cranked 'em out on a dot matrix printer. And I couldn't count how many cards, banners, etc. I made in Print Shop.

I think I was in 8th grade when my parents got our Apple II. I learned BASIC on it and played a game called Wizardry for hours and hours on end. It was definitely the springboard that got me into computers. And I still have it...

The first time I used an Apple computer was in 1985 or '86 at a now-defunct mom&pop computer store in Fort Scott, Kansas. They had some educational game running on a //c, using rabbits to show multiplication.

My parents ended up buying me the //c and that game and we kept it until '93. Lots of games, educational and not, like Oregon Trail, Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego, Wings of Fury, and other stuff like the original Print Shop. My mother managed a Country Kitchen and sometimes the computer'd be on half the night printing out menus from Print Shop on the ImageWriter II. brrrAAAPbrrp, brrAAAPbrrp.

I also learned a little BASIC, which was good and bad - good in that it exposed me to programming, bad in that it was such a terrible unstructured language. It also taught me to not fear the command line, which was excellent - let me learn MS-DOS and Linux more easily later on.

Our family's first computer was a Mac Plus with an external 20MB(!) hard drive, which we hung onto for what now seems an inordinately long time. The many years old computer even went to college for my freshman year. I probably used it as much as the rest of the family combined. I, too, was into pixel-painting, first in MacPaint and then in SuperPaint and HyperCard; I even made a morse code font using ResEdit. Dark Castle and Beyond, as well as other games ate far too much of my time.

The last Mac I personally owned was a PowerBook running MacOS 7.5. The fiscal realities of over-priced hardware and a possibly failing company pushed me over to the dark side. Today I split my computer love between linux (I do scientific computing) and a TabletPC (for doing math). But it's a good thing everyone copied the MacOS--the skills I learned using that old Mac Plus have served me well.

My first exposure was in Middle School. Our district was one of the very first in the country to build out an apple II lab. manually switched networking, green screens, and a program "server" almost exclusively used to run things like Oregon Trail (though I think that particular program came much later).

A short time later, a good family friend talked my parents into their largest single investment other than their house, a Mac 128k. That got traded in for a 512ke later due to requirements in Great Plains software, and they traded that in again for a Classic (still monochrome model). They had that classic for 11 years... They still have macs today.

I had some variant of a Mac II I used in college. 8MB of ram, fancy video card ("millions of colors" - oh my!), and for whatever reason that thing never, ever crashed. Early Mac OS wasn't a particularly stable beasty, but this particular machine had uptimes measured in months. I loved that thing.

I came to Apple late, mid-1994, while in high school... I'd been a Windows guy, but the Mac just blew my mind. I'd wanted to edit video digitally for a long time and a teacher had talked Apple into loaning the school a machine that could edit using Adobe Premiere. I was smitten right away and eventually had a 9500 at home as my first official Mac. We will all miss you Steve.

To this day I have never purchased anything from apple, despite my great admiration for nearly all their products. I have, however, owned two iPods. The first was a 2nd gen shuffle I found buried in the snow in the parking lot of the hotel I worked at near Killington, VT in 2008. Needless to say it felt like Santa decided to give me an extra, late Christmas gift. Later I owned an iPod video, which my brother passed down to me after 6 months of not really using it. I listened to music on it religiously on a daily basis, and watched season 3 of BSG on it too. Suffice to say my love for the gadget also meant I subjected the thing to all sorts of abuse, until the screen eventually cracked.

Since then, my relationship with Apple has been restricted to my girlfriend's 3GS, which I was planning to replace with two 5's this Christmas - one for each of us - until Tuesday's announcement, and my limitless lust for the Air, which I will have to buy next year when I visit the US.

I am too suprised at my own reaction to the news of his passing. I was left speechless last night, and felt betrayed to some extent. It's as if I believed me and him had an agreement that he'd live for at least another 50 years, innovating the tech business and the world at large with his minimalistic mind, and in turn I'd offer him profound admiration and the promise to mention his name in every job interview or any other opportunity in which someone would ask me for the definition of a great man.

My second computer was an Apple ][+ (my first was not an Apple) back in the early '80s. My third computer was an Apple //c. I learned to program 6502 assembly on them. I had learned a different flavor of BASIC on my first computer but did a lot of BASIC programming on the Apple ][ line. I drooled over an Apple ][gs and over the Mac II (was never really interested in the original Mac) but they were so stratospherically more than I could afford that that's all they would ever be... wishes and dreams. After the //c had passed into not being able to do what I needed anymore, I switched away from Apple and didn't go back. Various places I worked had some Macs and I played around with one of the PowerMax (IIRC) clones back in the late 90s that we had bought for our graphics designer before clones were verboten. I did buy a Mac Mini in 2009 to play around with it and I've had an iPhone (original, 3G, and 4) since about six months after the original one was released. I have an iPad as well but I have no idea where it is. I'd have to search for it.

Oregon Trail rocked. I always felt like we pulled something over on the teachers, because it was too fun to be 'educational'. Its also where I learned about dysentery - ha. Other notables were Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, which was pretty good. I also remember in high school playing Prince of Persia on the Apple 2c's when the science teacher wasn't looking.

In another weird memory, I did a semester abroad in England the late 90s and for whatever reason laptops weren't quite widespread (passive matrix screens sucked) and so our professors packed huge boxes with the black and white Macintosh's and shipped them on the plane (not likely today) and we lugged em to our apartment near Hyde Park. I wrote literally 12 papers on those Macs in one semester and we'd turn in the floppy disks. That was the last Mac I used, since I wanted to play Quake, but it got the job done.

I bought my first Apple computer for university: the first iteration of the MacBook line. It was the only computer my budget could afford with a 6-hours battery. I was hooked at the welcome animation. It was such a contrast compared to the software and hardware pain I daily experienced on my previous PackardBell laptop. I was the only one at the lab sessions without charger and I wrote on it countless reports and presentations to finally graduate with it. I will never forget the first time I pushed the power button nor the countless hours I spent to explore the powerful yet simple OS (Tiger).

The first time I used a computer it was an Apple II, at school of course, in 1981. Somehow the school I was going to in New Delhi, India had 4. As 5th graders, we were all amazed by them - the game of choice (maybe by necessity) was Lemonade Stand. You picked the price to sell it at, how much sugar and lemons to buy - the computer decided if it rained or not and whether it was hot or cold (affected demand). Basic graphics but oh how they were wonderful.

Now I can play much more fantastic games with graphics with a device the size of a pack of cards. My 2 year old daughter has learned to use our iPhones. Thank you Steve for making computers something my daughter doesn't think about how to use - she just does instinctively.

I had always used my brother's Dell PC to do whatever I wanted, bugging him for the computer, until I got the interest in Apple. My first entry into the Apple community was when I bought a second-generation iPod Nano, which led me into a huge lust for Apple products. My next big (Apple) purchase was my $1100 MacBook from early 2008, which I am even using to type this message on. While I have experienced frustration with it (primarily with installing Linux on the machine, which I still have yet to successfully do), I have always come back to a great and wonderful machine that is the Mac.

After buying my MacBook, I bought an iPod Touch to replace my Nano (with the help of my parents; I had convinced them I would use it for school work -- sad to say, I never did) and it was gorgeous. I am now in the process of buying my fourth Apple product (an iPhone 4 or 4S) once my current phone's contract runs out.

While I have tried going from a Mac back to a PC, it has never worked. Nothing is ever as elegant or as fresh as a Mac. Even though my MacBook is most likely on its last leg of OS support (it's running Lion, albeit not with all the features), I feel like I will always be an "Apple fanboy."

The first time I used an Apple product was ... well the year eludes me (google is my friend though it must have been in 1987), but I was underwhelmed. My current computer at the time was an Amiga 500, which had just been released and it blew away the Mac plus I used.

After that I never touched an Apple product again until the iPod and more recently my iPhone and a macbook pro (not mine). Apple products have just been way above my budget most of the years in between.

Before I ever touched an Apple computer, my first experiences were a TRS-80, a Commodore 64, the Atari STs at school, and an old generic PC running DOS I got from my father's office to do homework. It was late 1991 and I was at a friend's garage, his family owned a Macintosh Classic, we were supposed to do some homework with it. Compared to the other computers I played with, that Mac looked like it came from the future. It was a few years later when I could afford a Mac thanks to my first job. I bought the first Power Macintosh (the PowerMac 6100) on launch day. It was the first of many Apple devices I'd own.

I remember going over to a neighbor kid's house to see their new apple around 1980. Their dad was an engineer and they had the original Sierra mystery house program. Was pretty cool as I remember.I have never owned any Apple kit myself though. First computer was a Timex-Sinclair (with 16k add on memory), followed up by an 48k Atari 800 (I still have that).

My parents bought an Apple IIe for their business in 1982 or 83. I was 11 and was the only one that learned how to use it.

When my Dad lost his battle to pancreatic cancer in 1985, our Apple IIe became my coping mechanism. I remember throwing myself into the computer, tearing it apart, putting it back together again, losing myself in Sorcerer, Bard's Tale, Karateka, Captain Goodnight and Choplifter, among many other games.

Early Apple Computer memories? Playing Wizardry, a very primitive, yet fun game I got for Christmas, on my mom's Apple IIe around 1983 when she wasn't using it for her accounting. Fast forward 28 years to a 27" iMac, unibody MacBook Pro, iPad and iPhone and it's amazing to think about the progress made, these are physical manifestations of one man's vision, a legend, R.I.P. Steve, thanks for sharing..